In order to automatically open our favorite web browser on the default URL that our web server provides, we can set the open option to true as we do in the following example:

options: {
  base: 'www',
  keepalive: true,
  open: true
}

When we'd like to use a different web browser from the default one to open a URL other than the default one, we can provide an object to the open option that specifies exactly what we'd like. The following code specifies a URL, the browser that should be used to open it, and a callback function that should be called once it's been opened:

options: {
  base: 'www',
  keepalive: true,
  open: {
    target: 'http://localhost:8000/test.html',
    appName: 'firefox',
    callback: function() {
      console.log('Test URL opened in Firefox!');
    }
  }
}

The default port used by the connect task is 8000, but if you'd like to use a different one, the port option can be used to specify which one you'd like it to be, which is shown in the following code snippet:

options: {
  port: 3000,
  base: 'www',
  keepalive: true
}

In case you are not sure about which ports will be available when you start the server, it can be quite useful for you to have the server automatically select an open port. Setting the useAvailablePort option to true will enable this behavior. The code snippet for this is as follows:

options: {
  base: 'www',
  keepalive: true,
  useAvailablePort: true
}

In the case that you'd like the server to attach to a specific hostname and not just the default 0.0.0.0, you can make use of the hostname option in the following manner:

options: {
  base: 'www',
  keepalive: true,
  hostname: 'something.else.com'
}

If you have more than one directory that contains the files that you'd like to be serving, then the base option can be provided with an array of directory names to look up content. Here is a code snippet for your reference:

options: {
  base: ['www', 'other'],
  keepalive: true
}

If we'd like to use one of the many existing middleware plugins available for the Connect framework, we can set the middleware option to a function that modifies the middleware stack by adding the desired middleware to it.

There are times that it would be useful to work with the server that is created by the connect task. A good example of this is when we'd like to enable our server to handle Socket.IO interactions. This can be done by providing a function to the onCreateServer option that works with the created server in whichever way you like:

options: {
  base: 'www',
  keepalive: true,
  onCreateServer: function(server, connect, options) {
    var io = require('socket.io').listen(server);
    io.sockets.on('connect', function (socket) {
      // do something with socket
    });
  }
}